Aviosh

twelve covered courts — six in a row facing north, six south — the gates of the one ranged exactly fronting the gates of the other. Inside, the building was of two storeys and contained three thousand rooms, of which half were underground, and the other half directly above them. These rooms contained mysteries of wizardry that even the Coven of Chronologists were unaware of, and no nobleman or knight had been resilient enough to rip free from her cruel grip the legendary secrets within. It was rumored that the fundamentals of time travel and matter duplication were hidden deep near the center of the tomb, where beings of pure energy were thought to exist.

Arus, the arrogant prick that he was, would later claim to see arcane wizardry woven into the walls of living stone in the Hall of the Damned, where the echoes of dead servitors pierced the shadows and the skeletal remains of dead treasure seekers littered the ground. Idiots, all of them, and not because they were wrong, but because Arus was delusional and deserving of his title, The Lost.

At present, Arus’s gaze landed on statues of coarsely chipped obsidian. The statues were of powerful gods and mighty warriors, sentinels of a religion that had long since fallen into obsolescence. It was believed that all its followers engaged in a ritual mass-sacrifice in order to have their life essences sucked from their bodies and implanted into celestial orbs, for reasons that were unknown. In some cases, the statues had been defaced beyond recognition. Tomb robbers and other vagrancy were to blame for this. It was said that men stupid enough to slip a sleight hand into Avis tomb were held in no higher regard than pig shit, as they would, if they survived the expedition, become cursed with a life of impending doom. It was not known what a life of impending doom entailed, but those who believed in the curse thought that though with it would eventually suffer an irreversible hardship or physical ailment. All children’s’ waste and hogwash, thought Arus. It was his belief that men of critical standpoints were apt to claim corruption from the comfort of their padded armchairs, claiming that men who’d tried their hand at grifting tomb secrets had their minds wracked by a hooked webwork of raven claws, causing their bodies to become assiduously warped into ruined husks of chemical waste. It was a terrible thing to listen, and Seawolf was not about to relish on the verge of succumbing to falsehood and weakness.

The bottom of his brilliant vermilion overcoat dragged soggily behind Arus’s feet as he took his first step into the forbidden chamber. His sweat-ridden face was met with a refreshing gust of damp air through the cracks of massive wall-stones that were glazed with a thin film of beaded mist. Arus the Lost, upset about the damage to his newly woven travelers overcoat, took a deep breath and continued onward.